


The Bare Beginning of Things

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: The Sea-Wolf - Jack London
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Canon, San Francisco, Threesome - F/M/M, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:14:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28268946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: "I'll show thee the best springs. I'll pluck thee berries.I'll fish for thee and get thee wood enough..."Caliban (The Tempest, Act II, scene 2)
Relationships: Humphrey van Weyden/Maud van Weyden (née Brewster)/Wolf Larsen
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Bare Beginning of Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elektra121](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra121/gifts).



Had he been shown the image of himself in the present two years ago, he would scarce have believed it. That Humphrey Van Weyden was a bookish dilettante, consumed by the world of the pen, convinced that he could stand aside from the concerns of ordinary men who must work for a living. He was a creature of soft muscles and learning, content to stand upon his father's name. The Humphrey Van Weyden of the present day was a man. He had a pride in himself and the work he had wrought with his own two hands. He was a man who had survived ship-wreck, rescue, the violence and brutality of Captain Wolf Larsen and his crew, who had learned the hard craft of sailing and sealing, who had saved himself from that desperate voyage where survival had hung on a single man's whim. 

He had learned, too, to love, and wait, and win. As he strode home to a little cottage on Nob Hill, in the fashionable, bohemian quarter of San Francisco, Humphrey Van Weyden was a married man. Maud Brewster - that Maud Brewster, of the _Atlantic_ and the _Parisian Review_ \- a heroic, gently bred woman, who had brought her rare courage and her fine morality and her sense of the ridiculous into the same straits of peril and danger that had made Humphrey a man, had agreed to be his bride. Their comradeship forged in shared endeavor, they had been married not a month ago at a Mission church, surrounded by friends.

Humphrey, married. He marveled at his own good fortune. He loved Maud more and more every day, the exquisite oval of her face, her large brown eyes, the soft waves of her hair, which he was privileged now not only to see down, lying tangled over his wife's lace night-things, but to brush out so that every gleaming strand flowed over the sweet soft curve of her bosom. His wife was a creature of acerbic wit and exquisite writing, so that her words stirred the soul, yet she was a woman, and she shook Humphrey to the very heart of him, so that at the thought of her the sap sprung in his body and danced through his veins. His step quickened, his breath came faster, the hill had never been so steep and the sight of his own cherry red chimney and the smoke coming out of it never so welcome.

He loved her more and more every day, yet when Humphrey laid his hand to his own front door, he hesitated. The arm he raised was not the womanish, weak thing of two years ago, nor the wiry arm of privation and struggle, but well-muscled, with a patina of civilized softness over hard biceps: the arm of a successful male creature here at the beginning of the twentieth century. His hand was broad and hard, the hand of a working man, although his nails were well-tended and his skin scrubbed clean of the printer's ink that colored his new profession. And yet: and yet - the Humphrey of two years ago had been a man of scruples. He had turned away from the fleeting and frivolous feminine companionship enjoyed by some of his friends, and stopped his ears to the coarse conversation of sailors and hunters. His had been a bookish, cold life, hobbling some vital thing in his soul, and although that living soul stirred in him now his innocence of the realities of married life had been complete, and thus his happiness was not unalloyed. In short, he understood the mechanisms of the marriage bed, but had yet to experience its full joys, and he knew enough only to understand what he lacked.

He was his wife's willing slave, and yet he had still to bring to her the full measure of his devotion. So, for that one moment, he hesitated. And then, he fitted his key to the lock, and turned it, and opened the door.

"Darling!"

So sweet the sound! In an instant his arms were full of the noblest and loveliest of women, his own dear Maud, her small hands firmly attached to his shoulders, her exquisite face turned up to his, half-smiling, half pouting. "You're later than you promised!" she cried, and the words were so bountifully domestic that Humphrey could not but feel his heart leap in his breast. They had survived, together, squalls and tempests that would have up-turned the stoutest soul, all for this, that his dear small woman could say to him, "You're late!"

He pressed his lips to the top of her head, where her soft brown hair escaped its pins. "But I brought your proofs," he said. 

All was forgiven in an instant. The table was cleared, the maid sent home and the evening's stew set to simmer, and they lost themselves in discussion of this, the first book published not by Maud Brewster, but by Maud Van Weyden. Time mattered little, so that the sun set over the bay and the moon came up, its silver curves illuminating the domestic scene: Humphrey with his jacket off and his shirt-sleeves rolled up, Maud animated and bright-eyed, both of them quickened by conversation, working together in a harmony of purpose. 

Suddenly, Maud raised her head. Her eyes met Humphrey's, wide and calm, but with the faintest trace of apprehension lurking in their depths. She reached out her hand, just as the moonlight struck across the table and its papers, lending her pale face a ghostly white shade. "Humphrey," she said, "Something is happening."

There was no footfall outside their front door, where the short paved path led towards the boardwalk. No raucous accents disturbed the night. Yet Maud's small hand gripped Humphrey's as strongly as she had hauled on the sheets and ropes of their storm-tossed boat, and her body thrilled with the power of her woman's intuition. 

"Humphrey-"

The sharp rap of the knock on the door echoed between them. Maud's grip tightened; Humphrey found himself vibrating to the intimation of danger as if stuck by some great tuning fork. Their eyes met, Maud's mouth gently parted, Humphrey stirring with the urge to protect and defend his home and his woman.

"It's probably only the maid," Maud said. "Or Mrs. Sanchez - she said she would come around with that receipt." She lifted her hand, turning to the door.

"Darling, no, leave it," said Humphrey.

It was too late. Swift and light-footed, Maud had reached their door, and flung it open. On the step, his head bent, moonlight glinting from the band of his hat and the buttons of his coat, stood a man. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but his presence seemed even greater than his physical size, so that Maud fell back from the door with a soundless gasp, her hand pressed to her breast, and Humphrey stood so quickly his chair was flung backwards, and the broad dining table pushed across the wooden floor. Papers scattered, the kitten leapt after the preface and the hound stole the footnotes, and in the doorway Wolf Larsen slipped his hat off and looked up.

"Well," he said, in that terrible, familiar voice that had terrorized sailing crews from Lofoten to the Ross Sea, that had discussed poetry and in the same breath ordered men beaten and murdered and destroyed, their souls lost and their bodies broken. "Good evening, Mrs. Van Weyden. Mr. Van Weyden."

Humphrey started forwards. There was nothing of the dilettante about him now: he was the young bull challenging the old, his blood hot and heavy in his veins, his teeth bared.

"Humphrey!"

One soft word and he stopped in his tracks. Maud had turned her eyes to his, all the soft womanly sympathy of her sex laid plain, and Humphrey was caught as surely as cod on a line. In that moment, he lost the courage of fear. He had never been a match for Wolf Larsen in the full power of his primeval manliness, and although Humphrey revolted against his own powerlessness, his knowledge of it held him still. If Maud had but seen his face, with all its dark passion bridled - but she did not.

With a sweet smile, her eyes mild and calm, Mrs. Maud Van Weyden curtsied, and said, "My husband and I were just about to eat. Won't you join us, Captain Larsen?"

"Why," said Wolf Larsen, just as if he were a civilized man and not a monster. "Why, Mrs. Van Weyden, I take that invitation very kindly. Very kindly indeed."

"You're very welcome," Maud smiled.

With a fluttering wave of her hand, she invited Wolf Larsen into their home. His hesitation on the threshold was charming, and he wiped his feet on the mat and hung his hat on the hook like a gentleman, and his eyes were pale blue and mild. Yet as he laid claim to a chair at the table, his eyes flashed once, with all their old fire and rage, so that Humphrey started to his feet again. 

"Oh, thank you," said Maud. "The best cutlery, if you don't mind, and napkins, too. We don't want Captain Larsen thinking us uncivilized."

And so Humphrey, humbled, tidied away the proofs, and laid the table, just as he had done two years ago in Captain Larsen's filthy stateroom on the sealing schooner _Ghost_ , in the strange hinterland of the savage sea, over which no law made in the white senate houses of the land held sway. On the other side of the table, Wolf Larsen sat still, and breathed, so that the suffocating heaviness of his presence spread throughout the room, and the hound cringed and fled to his corner, and the kitten hid under the bed. 

Yet, as she worked, Maud began to hum, a quiet, lilting tune that matched the lightness of her slippered feet and the busy whisk of her skirts at the range. It cut through the close air, and lifted it as easily as if a breeze swept the room clean, so that Humphrey found himself smiling, and Wolf Larsen's shoulders relaxed. 

"You'll forgive me for asking," said Maud Brewster, as she brought the crock-pot to the table, a white apron encircling her tiny waist and her small hands holding the heavy pot close. "But the last time we saw you was in a shroud."

He had forgotten, in his anger and fear, that Maud was partner as well as wife. Humphrey, struck, braced himself, and gave Wolf the kind of steady, neutral stare he had learned from her courage.

"Appearances can be deceptive," said Wolf Larsen.

"There was no breath in you," Maud returned. She turned a plate, hefted it, and reached for the serving ladle. "Stew?" she said. "Bouillabaisse. Fish, Captain Larsen." 

To Humphrey's astonishment, he could see the amusement in her eyes, and the lift of her mouth. There was jauntiness, too, about the lift of the ladle, which suggested Maud Brewster, on home ground, knew that here she was mistress. 

"No questions?" said Wolf Larsen. "No quizzing? No tittering? Do I not come with the stink of the grave on me?"

"You do not," said Humphrey. "And, pray, pass the pepper grinder, if you please."

He had often dreamed of it, but never achieved it: Wolf Larsen was silenced. His mouth worked, that straight, fleshy mouth that would have fallen so easily into dissipation were it not held in terrible discipline, and he swallowed, but no words came out of his mouth. Instead, he passed the pepper pot. 

"Bread?" asked Maud brightly. "Butter?"

"Alright!" exclaimed Wolf Larsen. "Bread! Butter! A knife on a plate!"

"Why, indeed so," said Maud. "It's hard to see how you might manage without." She smiled. "Now," she smiled, tucking in her skirt and taking her place. "Shall we say grace?"

Incredulously, Wolf Larsen stared across the table at Humphrey, who bowed his head and clasped his hands. He could not but, however, flash a quizzical glance at his wife, his help-mate, his partner -in-crime.

"Ha!" cried Wolf Larsen. "I knew it! Oh, you've done me proud, Hump."

"I should hope so," said Maud. "Nevertheless, Humphrey, if you please."

As was their custom, Humphrey found himself reciting the age-old words of the Lutheran blessing, so absent at sea. At first trite, the words had seemed to take on a greater resonance across the shared table. "Our Father... Lord God, Heavenly Father, bless us and these Thy gifts..." 

"Amen," said Maud quietly. Then, "Please, eat. Captain, you have a tale to tell us?"

Hobbled by the strange echo of thankfulness, with his spoon halfway to his mouth and all the power and force of his body wrapped in domestic chains, Wolf Larsen looked up. There was a dark light in his eyes, as if he brought the night with him, and the shadow of a sneer crossed his face. "After you left me for dead?" he said, and slurped his stew with the same careless manners of the fo'c'sle. "It was dark and cold in that shroud, Mrs Van Weyden, and then sea took me in and froze me to the bones. Think of it: the long drop, and then the cold..."

"Napkin?" suggested Maud brightly.

"And I supposed you to be holding quite the literary salon, Hump," said Wolf Larsen, eyes fixed on Maud. "I find it a boxing hall."

"I trust, to your taste," said Humphrey, placid and smiling, with a glint in his eye. "We like to entertain our guests."

"Death does not scare you then?" said Wolf Larsen. "The striving force of life in you, hungry and grasping for the light? I tore and ripped at that shroud in my mind, Mrs. Van Weyden, until my fingers were shredded and sliced to the bone, but I could not move an inch, while the water crept past my chest and lapped at my neck."

"Such a death as you wished on others," said Humphrey.

"Life raged in me," said Wolf Larsen. "And then-" he snapped his fingers - "It was gone. Black. Dark. Nothing. Resign yourself, Hump, there are no angels in death, and no light will come for you. It is an absence of-" he broke off, searching for the word.

"Life, I assume," Maud interjected.

Wolf Larsen's great head lifted, and his great fist thumped on the table, so that the dishes and cutlery rattled and shivered. "Life!" he thundered. "Life! Desire! Everything that differentiates us from this piggish gutter striving!" 

"So, life returned, then?" asked Humphrey, interested. His eyes met Maud's, and he knew the thrill of mutual understanding. So, in parlors and meeting houses, and across their own table, they had guided conversation and discussion. Together they had honed a talent to amuse, and they slipped into that role now side by side.

"A boat returned, surely," said Maud. "A schooner." After nearly a year voyaging, she was sweetly cognizant of the intricacies of ships and sailing, without the calluses Humphrey bore which twinged and ached still in the damp, but with a kind misapprehension of the toll of pain demanded by the sea.

"A ship like no ship I have ever seen. Flat, like a saucer, with sails of paper, and a queer lateen rig. The sailors on her were odd little men, with dark eyes and pointed teeth, but they fished me out of the ocean fair enough, and laid me on their deck. There was an old man among them, and he set about my body like a - like a man washes a shirt, twisting and pulling and wringing, and thumping, so that all the suds are knocked out of it, and then there was ointment - like fire, like live coals, torture, and no let up - they were not Christian men, Mrs. Van Weyden, and they did not rest on Sundays."

"And yet," said Maud, "And yet, you sit before us unscathed and undamaged..."

"You cannot see the damage to my soul!" said Wolf Larsen. "For it burned to be so helpless, so that they must - they spooned cold fish in my mouth, and mealy broth, and I must eat it, and then - then there came a day when my toe twitched, and I knew then I should return to the world of living men."

Maud cocked her head on one side. 

"And women," said Humphrey. 

"Pah!" said Wold Larsen, glowering. "I lay all the living fire of man at his most elemental before you, and you coo like a pair of lovebirds. And women! I should like to have seen you swallow a wriggling octopus, beak and all, or lie still while a man walks his bare, horny feet up and down your back!"

"I gather you have visited the islands of Japan," said Maud. "Are you finished with that dish? There is more stew in the pot if you desire."

She stood poised at the head of the table, the lamplight lighting her clear brown eyes and making a halo of her soft hair, while the apron strings drew in around her trim little waist and made her a dear little doll of a woman. She looked as fragile as a Dresden countess, although she was through and through as strong as porcelain. 

The man she looked at should be her direct opposite. Wolf Larsen was a beast of a man, shaped in a crucible that had made of him a perfect physical form. Muscle broadened his shoulders and shaped his back, rippled along his forearms and bulged at his biceps. His thighs were as solid as a Norwegian pine tree; his calves of iron, and his fists were forged and hardened in the very pits of hell. He was fair, fair skinned at his wrists and neck, although his hands and face were bronzed, and fair to look at, a handsome, murderous devil. 

Humphrey had seen him eviscerate a sailor with one blow, and torment others until they cared not if they lived or died. Like Creon, Captain Wolf Larsen was a tyrant, and at his end Wolf, too, ruled a wooden kingdom made empty by his own cruel tyranny. And yet: untaught, unschooled, Wolf Larsen's mind was a questioning auteur, seizing upon ideas and imagery, devouring Voltaire and Rousseau, Paine and Spencer; debating, insisting, illustrating, terrible in its delight, and it was that Wolf Larsen too Humphrey recalled, who had held men and ideas alike in the steel grip of his fist. 

His wife, Humphrey felt, and Wolf Larsen, had more in common than he had previously considered. He recalled, with a new twist of chagrin, the discussions Maud Brewster and Wolf Larsen had shared, when she had been a shipwrecked rescue and he the ship's captain, while Humphrey himself was cook and steward, ship's boy and mate, shaping his weak, scholar's muscles and learning his seaman's trade. The schooner _Ghost_ had been a hard school. None harder, unless it be the steamer _Macedonia_ , the dread kingdom of Death Larsen, Wolf's older brother.

"Is this flat, unhappy life all you have?" asked Wolf Larsen. "Where is the woman who faced me down on my own ship? I gather you have visited - pah! I bring you a tale of endurance and courage, strange beasts and omens, the triumph of the very force of life itself, and you ask me if I want stew? And you, Hump - you were a poor thing when we dragged you out of San Francisco Bay. I made a man of you on that voyage, until you could stand on your own two legs and hold your head high! What has marriage made of you? Where is your hunger now, your rage, your _desire_? Is it all soul with you now, and no desire?"

He was ever alert to the small psychologies of men. Maud was calm and still, but Humphrey, stung to his man's heart, flinched. 

"Too much of the head," Wolf Larsen said softly, "And not enough of the body." His eyes were as opaque as storm clouds, moving between Humphrey and his wife as deliberately as he had once surveyed the ocean. He may as well have taken a spyglass to the faults between them, in insatiable, questioning query.

"That is none of your business!" exclaimed Humphrey. 

He had taken the bait that Wolf Larsen had laid down, and now he was on the hook. 

"You were unfortunate in your worldliness, Hump. A weak, puling thing. And you - a blue-stocking: a woman worthy of a pirate, but a blue stocking none the less. And yet there is that in both of you that cries out to live," said Wolf. "Isn't there? Isn't there? To grasp and tug at the fiercest ecstasy?" 

Had Hump been more in the habit of subterfuge or deference, as he had been two years ago, or less pricked in his new-wed pride, he might have let Wolf Larsen's words pass him by. But he was not. The flush of anger heated his cheeks and his pride; his eyes flashed, his fists clenched, and he found himself standing over the table, braced to defend his mate and his marriage. He was half-conscious, too, of the kindling gleam in Maud's bright eyes, yet his entire attention was bent on the devil, Wolf Larsen.

On the _Ghost_ , Wolf Larsen had returned violence with peremptory and unpredictable bloody revenge, hot or cold, inevitable as the tide. Here on dry land, he leaned back in his chair, tipping the legs as Humphrey had never done, his broad shoulders relaxed, his scarred hands laid on the table. His eyes danced, bright and clear, speckled with little flecks of gold that seemed to float across the blue of them, sparkling. "Oh, Hump," he said, smiling. "What a shame it is! Wilt thou yet take all Galilean?"

"Don't quote Swinburne to me!" said Humphrey. "You are a guest here, Larsen!"

"And yet the sentiments of civilisation cripple the imagination," said Wolf Larsen softly, holding Humphrey's gaze. "Shame, that murderer of joy... Hump, dear, _kind_ Hump, should you not like to take the laurel? The palms and the pæan? To cast aside the bonds of convention and reach that ultimate, shared, triumph?"

His voice, which could cut like the lash of a rope's end or crack like snap of the wind tearing a sail to shreds, was a golden lure. Lamplight hid the cruelty in his face, and made beauty of his bronzed face and his gay smile. He was made in the image of the gods, beautiful not as the young are beautiful, but as the powerful are: a Zeus, not an Adonis, and Humphrey could not but thrill to the voice and the mind laid bare. Hesitation dragged at his heels: he glanced at his wife.

Maud, too, was standing. Her face was musedly and sweetly flushed, her soft hair falling from its pins, her eyes alight with that same curious bravery that had carried her through stranger seas and hardier storms than this. She was at least as brave as Humphrey and he knew it: he reached out his hand to hers, and felt the strength of their marriage in the grip of her small fingers. Together, they were the most intrepid of explorers. 

"I'm sure we'll learn together, Captain Larsen," said Maud Van Weyden. "I trust you have the skill to demonstrate adequacy."

"Adequacy-" exclaimed Wolf Larsen. "Adequacy!"

Humphrey saw the light in her eyes, and knew he was lost to his wife's desires, however they bent. It was his ring on her finger, he would hold to that, no matter how strange the voyage - and if he were to be honest, he was not unmoved, for the same great sea moved in him as in her.

"Perhaps you would like to start by illustration," said Maud. Her fingers tightened on Humphrey's, and a smile began to play at the corner of her mouth. "For example, in providing the naked - male - form?" She raised an eyebrow. 

Wolf Larsen started. "To - but-" he coughed, drew back: his fingers went to his neckcloth and played in the folds. "You're demanding, and I like you better for it," he said. Still, there was unease in his yoice, as if he knew the wheel had been taken from his hands. 

"Did you expect other?" Maud asked, sweetly. "Please. Undress."

The word sent a thrill of sensation across every inch of Humphrey's skin, as if a sudden shock of ice-cold spray was instantly followed by a flash of wildfire. He could not take his eyes from his own wife, and yet that perfect masculine figure, naked, drew both his eyes and his thoughts. Even so, although Maud stood still, there was exactly such a tension in her slight body, and a wildness in her eyes, as she looked at their guest. Humphrey, enraptured, followed her gaze.

If one was to delineate the perfect male animal, Wolf Larsen was it. The unbuttoning of his jacket revealed his rounded, breast: of his shirt, the muscle under it flexing and bunching as he moved, and the fierce growth of hair that clustered in tight curls on his belly. His forearms were shapely, his upper arms powerfully formed, and his shoulders built to carry an ox, yet the unknotting of his kerchief revealed the secret soft hollow of his neck, pale as a lily. His hands were discoloured and misshapen, yet the curve of his haunches, as he drew his pants over his hips, was as shapely as any Ganymede, and his skin in these hidden places as soft and rounded as a California peach. And all the while his eyes were fixed on theirs unabashed, as he shed one after another the clothings of the civilised man. When he straightened, his nether parts were heavy and well shaped, his ballocks the size of ripe plums falling between his thighs, and his prick upstanding from its lively thatch, thick and bald as an alderman. 

"Am I not a man?" said Wolf Larsen.

The sight of his body took Humphrey's breath away. Wolf Larsen was a man, every upstanding inch of him, a brute steam train of a man, engineered for power. 

"Well, have I convinced you? Now tell me, do you two find me good?"

The scintillating clear blue of his eyes was alight with tiny golden sparks, speaking of demand and clamour, reined in. 

"Humphrey," said Maud, "You may take down my hair."

It would have been an insult to ask if she was sure. Humphrey moved around the table, and under the heavy gaze of Wolf Larsen, took down his wife's hair. His fingers were not quite steady as he drew out pin after pin, the silky strands uncoiling, teasing, slipping, so all the loosened tendrils curled at her ears and at the nape of her neck. The full mass of it came down in a rush, rippling over her back and shoulders, gleaming in the lamplight. Under Wolf Larsen's eyes, Humphrey reached for the hairbrush, and made of the tangles a waist-length silken robe. Maud could have been a statue, a Galatea, and Wolf Larsen did not look away, naked, unabashed, his eyes the heavy grey of a storm cloud, his mouth parted. The only moving part about him was his man's part, which jerked with every stroke of the brush and began to weep at the head, so that it wept and glistened. Humphrey knew that he would not have been able to resist closing his hand about that proud flesh, and if gripped, he could not but stroke, and then again, and again - he ached with the echo of the sensation - but Wolf Larsen did not twitch. 

Humphrey, though, found his knees weak and his breath short. 

"And - and the dress?" Humphrey had to clear his throat. 

"Darling," said Maud. 

She had never allowed this intimacy before. Humphrey had to learn his way anew through the rigging of buttons and laces, fumbling his grip and misstepping, so that he had unwoven the tie of Maud's wrap before he remembered to kneel and slide off her little boots. Her dress fell away, and then her petticoat, so that she stood barefoot in her chemise and drawers, both so fine that the rosebud blush of her nipples pressed against the muslim, and the dark curls of her sex were a shadow under cotton. She was all woman, small and perfectly made, from the curve of her waist to the heavy beauty of her breasts, and Humphrey saw Wolf Larsen swallow, while his dark gaze sharpened and became that of the predator for which he was named. There was the promise of teeth in Wolf Larsen's bared grin, and the sharp shadows of bruised flesh and blood-letting, as the wolf in him roared - and then, his face was blank again. 

Humphrey did not know how it might have fared with them had Wolf Larsen not held himself on the tightest of curbed reins. Fear, sharpening every sense, was an ice-cold frisson. He shivered, and in doing so, drew that predatory gaze.

"Now you, Hump," said Wolf Larsen. "Now you."

It not occurred to Humphrey that he too would be expected to undress. Yet Wolf Larsen's appetite had not yet diminished: the hunger in his eyes was fixed on Humphrey, and in that moment Humphrey felt the old fascination with the most violent of appetites, and the most forceful and questioning of minds. If Wolf Larsen ever looked at him as he looked at Maud, with the most immoral of all appetites, Humphrey might fear for his immortal soul indeed.

He turned away. Quickly and neatly, under Maud's gentle smile, he undressed, folding his clothes and laying them aside. His body was not the slender thing it had once been, for the _Ghost_ had left her mark in his scarred knee and battered knuckles, in the new breadth of his shoulders and his strong back, but Humphrey was no Wolf Larsen. To look up, then, and see Wolf Larsen's eyes still fixed on him, those eyes so bright that they might be burning embers in his face, as if desire was directed at Humphrey, was so startling Humphrey gasped. 

Maud put out her hand, closing it around Humphrey's forearm, a soft, warm reassurance, and Wolf Larsen, at last, moved. Three paces alone took him to Maud's side, the lithe, stalking paces of a great beast. There was no hesitation in him. He swept her up in his arms and, even as Humphrey sprung forwards, took two paces towards the day-bed and laid her out upon it as gently as if his great scarred hands had never struck death with a single blow. Those same hands hesitated, waited, and given permission lifted Maud's chemise as neatly as any lady's maid, and then untied her drawers and slide them down, so that Maud lay as naked as a fairy queen in her bower, with Wolf Larsen the worshipping Caliban between her pale thighs. There was a tremulous wild look in her eyes, and her bosom rose and fell with short, sweet gasps, while all her hair lay about her in fierce beauty. She reached out a hand, beseeching, until Humphrey could catch it and carry it to his breast, kneeling beside her, so that he looked down her naked beauty to the monster she had allowed. 

Yet Wolf Larsen was a man transfigured. Humphrey had expected the brute to leap upon Maud, to destroy the strange serenity of his wife's beauty, but Wolf Larsen's eyes were closed and his hands open; he took great shuddering breaths, as if the scent of a woman was the very breath of life to him. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "May I?" he pleaded, as he may have done as some long ago infant. "May I?"

"Yes," said Maud simply, and spread her thighs.

And to Humphrey's immense shock, he did not rise above Maud like some great wave, to penetrate and ride her; instead, Wolf Larsen lowered his face, and pressed his mouth to the very heart of her womanliness, her pudenda. His eyes remained closed, his dark lashes bent down, his mouth fallen open, and the expression on his face as he drew secret scent of Maud's femininity was that of a man transported. He rolled his face against her, basking in her curls, in her hidden flesh, in the secret folds and curlicues of her sex, as if he were worshipping his goddess. 

It had never occurred to Humphrey that such a thing was possible. Yet Wolf Larsen had accomplished it in an instant. And more: his hands moved, spreading Maud open, he licked his lips, and his eyes flashed up, and then, like some great beast, he began to stroke and succour her sex with his open mouth, with the great, wet, fleshy weapon of his tongue, with the gentle scrape of his teeth and the pressure of his chin. His steel grip held her still for these obscene and intimate embraces, yet it was gentled, for no bruise rose on her tender woman's flesh, and under his touch Maud gasped and rose and writhed, her hand in one instant gripped as a vice on Humphrey's and in another stuck open, her fingers palsied with delight. As he pleasured her, triumph flashed in the grey-gold of Wolf Larsen's eyes, and yet, although there was little kindness in him, there was a dangerous empathy, for he could read the roll and fall of Maud's body as well as he could read the waves, riding her as the sea, which could be gentled but never mastered. A fevered blush stressed the delicate line of her brows and perfect curves of her mouth, with one hand she gripped her husband, while the other was wound in Wolf Larsen's hair, as if she held at bay a dangerous beast and beloved beast.

"You're a handy man, Mr Van Weyden," said Wolf Larsen. "You'll get the way of it. Just hope for a fair wind." He was grinning, his bared teeth a flash of white, and then he lowered his head again, until Maud, breathless and flushed, heaving, convulsed in his hands. Her face, that looked so perfect to Humphrey in all circumstances, was transported with ecstasy.

"Oh, please," she said, at the end, her woman's voice broken and breathy. "Please, please!"

"Yes!" cried Humphrey.

All that was soft and tender and clinging about her, the vain beat and flutter of her soft body, became in that moment as fierce as if she was a tigress under her skin. Humphrey could never have imagined such violence, or such beauty, He could not but wonder at seeing her so transported, and long to bring her the same pleasure; he met Wolf Larsen's eyes, and felt a dangerous, deep sympathy, for in that moment they were akin, brought together over Maud's body.

Wolf Larsen's eyes flashed gold. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and laughed. He held Humphrey's eyes, and rose, inevitable as the great sea of the southern ocean, his broad shoulders glistening with sweat, his hands iron, his prick a steel bar between the great thews of his thighs. There was a heavy deliberation about his actions; one might as well, Humphrey thought faintly, watch the great engine of some ocean liner at full steam. His hands, rising to clasp Maud's sweet body, turned her, settling her on his lap, so that they both faced Humphrey where he knelt. Maud's face was lax with the aftermath of joy, but Wolf Larsen's was tight and fierce. Her limbs were loose, but his all bunched power, the muscles writing under his pale skin; her sex was soft and liquid, while his was a towering imperative, a fiery red. Even as she clung to his shoulders, Wolf Larsen lifted Maud's body with one hand: with the other, he pulled at the massive prick that swayed in front of Humphrey's nose, and then, in one powerful moment, he impaled Maud's body on his own. She, pierced, cried out, while he, embraced, was driven to a single gasp from behind gritted teeth. Humphrey thought him cracked open to tenderness, but his grip was relentless: it was his whim to give no respite, but instead grasp Maud tight and force her to rise and fall, impaled, her thighs spread over his, so that Humphrey saw the pink, glistening folds of her, the damp dark curls, the intimate embrace of her body around the force and pride of Wolf Larsen's towering manhood. He was an immoveable object, a god in his swollen pride, she the odalisque that, crying out, yielding, was forced to take him again and again. And yet, even as Maud whimpered, Humphrey could see her body flower under that rough treatment, her sex glisten and soften, her chest flush above the entrancing ripple of her breasts, her soft mouth gasp and her eyes darken, veiled with renewed passion.

"Go on," grunted Wolf Larsen. "Get your - mouth on her, sir!"

And Humphrey did. He found himself on his knees between the tree trunks of Wolf Larsen's thighs, face to face with his wife's sex, choked by the salt-sweet scent of her women's liquor and a man's harsher, acrid essence, his fixed gaze on the fleshy column that plowed his wife's body. Nothing in the world was so arresting as the sight of man in the full grip of his rutting arrogance. It was an intimacy that transported him: his ballocks had drawn as tight and hard as billiard balls, close to bursting, his own prick was a column of fire, his mind mazed with unknown and overwhelming pleasures. 

"Sir!" cried Wolf Larsen, even as his own flesh jerked and throbbed, straining against the inevitable conclusion of his labors.

Obeying as swiftly as if the lash followed the words, Humphrey bent his head, and closed his mouth around those most intimate of his wife's parts. He could feel her swell under his touch, her scent eddied around his nose, and at that moment Wolf Larsen raised her body and held her still. His powerful haunches drove his prick into her body time and again, so that Humphrey could feel each piston-thrust, the powerful welling of masculine sap, and yet he could still lap and mouth at her body uninterrupted, until she was crying out, fastening her hands in his hair, convulsed as a cross-bow with a single bolt. 

"Ah!" Humphrey cried out. Never before had he dreamed he could bring Maud such ecstasy. It was a revelation, and a delight: he could barely think with the triumph of it. His chest was heaving, his face and chest flushed, his heart fluttering, while some masculine animal spirit seemed to have seized his soul, so that he too longed to grasp, to possess, to struggle, to capture or to be captured as any wild beast.

"Ah," whispered Maud. 

She was curled on Wolf Larsen's broad chest, and everything about her now was soft, her touch sweetened, her body folding in on itself, so that the great prick which had brought her such joy was bared to Humphrey's gaze, slipping free, still as proud as it was when it had begun its voyage. Maud's hand reached for Humphrey's, and he held it, the sweet touch of a loved one, as dear as the essence of their spirit, or the words that fell from their lips or sped from their pen. As he did, Wolf Larsen lifted her and laid her out, as if she was as beloved to him as she was to her mate. His hand lingered on her hair, smoothing it to lie over the pillows, even as her eyes closed into, Humphrey knew, and thrilled to the thought, the vastness and profundity of the quiet that followed bodily ecstasy.

Only when this task was accomplished, beside her, Wolf Larsen clenched his fists and groaned, overcome - and then mastered himself with terrible and indomitable will. He had held himself back from that awful precipice: his sex still throbbed, unassuaged, and in a instant his eyes opened again, all their fiery gold fixed on Humphrey. He smiled, like his namesake. "Oh, yes, Hump," said Wolf Larsen, with dreadful softness. "And there you have it." 

Humphrey could not take his eyes off the triumphant beast. He reached out his hand. His fingers trembled, but Wolf Larsen's grip was iron.

**Author's Note:**

> Wolf Larsen quotes Swinburne, discussing Christianity repressing sensuality in _Hymn to Prosperine_ :
> 
> _Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,_  
>  _The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;_  
>  _Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath_  
> 


End file.
